Natalie sighed, clearly exasperated. “You’re looking at a section of the Voynich that’s been hidden for hundreds of years. My father was dead seventy-two hours after taking possession of it, and his partner’s enforcement thugs have been overturning every rock they can find to locate me — I’ve gotten multiple warnings on that front from my contact network. You’ve just been visited by two gentlemen who were extremely interested in your whereabouts. Precisely what more do you need to know?” she asked.
“We don’t know for sure what that was about…” Steven protested, but she grabbed his arm to quiet him.
“There are two possible explanations. First is that I’m crazy, and this is all an elaborate hallucination of mine, and we’re in no danger of anything worse than dying of boredom while you study the rarest document in the world. The alternative is that I’m telling the truth, and it’s as bad as or worse than I’m saying, in which case it’s going to require every bit of luck and skill we can muster to be alive tomorrow. I think you need to decide which it is, because right now you’re wasting time on an issue I thought was decided,” Natalie fumed.
She was right. It was A or B. Either way, it would do no harm to examine the Scroll thoroughly — at worst, he was trapped in a Tuscan villa with a stunning femme fatale who favored Catwoman suits and had the most amazing eyes he’d ever seen…who might also be kind of crazy. Actually, that wasn’t the worst case scenario, but he didn’t want to think about the second possibility just yet.
“I’ll admit you’re persuasive, Natalie. Let me get to work on these and see if I can spot anything that would be a giveaway or a clue. But as you know, the Voynich’s kept its secrets for a long time. I’m not sure how much I can do in a day,” Steven parried.
“Better get busy, then. This is our only shot, on the off-chance that I’m not as nutty as a Christmas fruitcake,” she said, and then beamed a thousand kilowatt smile at him before turning and leaving him to his work.
As the day wore on, Steven took Natalie up on her offer of lunch and was pleasantly surprised at the spread she set out. Organic green salad, gnocchi pesto, dry salami, rigatoni in a four cheese sauce, all accompanied by a passable bottle of chianti.
They ate on the small, brick-built outdoor breakfast patio off of the kitchen, which had a sturdy rustic pine picnic table and two benches. Natalie and Frederick sat across from him, making strained small talk about where they could go from Italy to ensure her continued survival. Steven had probed for some more information on her background, but the attempt had been met with a polite but firm rebuff.
Steven wondered what the exact nature of Natalie and Frederick’s relationship was — she seemed far more relaxed with him than Steven would have expected her to be with a driver, and he seemed to know everything she did about their current adventure, even though he limited his commentary to a few terse words. As with much that had occurred over the last half a day, Steven figured he’d discover more in time and contented himself with savoring the gourmet meal while thinking through his examination of the Scroll.
“Are you making any progress?” Natalie asked after he thanked her for lunch, clearly having resisted the urge to raise the subject throughout the meal.
“Perhaps. The glyphs look the same as the rest of the Voynich, but they’re arranged in a different format, almost like short descriptive paragraphs. That would be consistent with several other quires, but there’s just something that strikes me as unusual about this set. I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on it, but I’m working on it,” Steven summarized.
“If you have a breakthrough, I’m all ears, Steven. I’m thinking I’ll take a nap while you’re working — Frederick can get you anything you need,” she said, yawning ever so slightly into her cupped hand.
“I’ll try to have the whole thing wrapped up by the time you wake up,” Steven said easily as he reentered the dining room.
After spending several hours poring over every nuance of the parchment pages, the truth was that Steven was no closer to deciphering the Scroll than when he’d first laid eyes on it. That wasn’t unexpected, although a part of him felt disappointed. It would have been wonderful if it had inspired a Eureka moment. But in his experience, that wasn’t how things worked. He was very good and had honed his skills over the years, but there were no secrets to decryption only he knew — much of the time it was simple trial and error. One painstakingly looked for patterns and tried known examples of encryption techniques that dated from the same period, hoping that it would yield a solution, or at least a direction to follow. But the Voynich had always been inscrutable, impervious to all efforts to decode it. Even after the best in the field had done their best, there had been no breakthrough. Plenty of theories, but no solutions.
He wearily rubbed his hands over his face and stood back from the dining room table as he stared at the collected pages. There was so much data to incorporate, and no obvious place to start. This was an almost impossible task, and he wondered absently why the Order had spent so much energy guarding what on the surface appeared to be just more Voynich cypher. It made no sense. He began pacing in frustration, his gaze wandering absently over the Scroll as his mind raced. There was something there, but so elusive…
Wait a second. The crest on the final page of the Scroll, under the elaborately drawn roots of a mythical plant. That looked vaguely familiar.
Steven racked his brain to recall why he’d felt a stirring, or where he’d seen the crest before. It was a tiny depiction of a labyrinth, which seemed out of place in this seemingly medicinal chapter. He concentrated on it, searching his memory banks for the recollection, but couldn’t place it. He continued pacing. That crest. What was the significance? For that matter, what was the significance of any of the illustrations, depicting everything from elaborate, nonsensical plumbing diagrams replete with bathing nude women, to cosmological diagrams of unfamiliar or fantastical galaxies or constellations, to plants that appeared to be hybrids of the real and the invented?
Whenever he spent long hours studying the Voynich, he always felt like he was being sucked down a dark rabbit hole into an upside-down world where nothing made sense. Today’s efforts were no different.
And yet that symbol. He’d seen it before.
Steven moved to the computer and, from online scans of the complete document, spent an hour looking at every illustration in the Voynich. The labyrinth didn’t appear anywhere, so he hadn’t seen it before in the Voynich. Frustrated, he switched strategies and loaded a search engine, then proceeded to pore through countless results for medieval astrological and astronomical symbols. There were tens of thousands, and he quickly acknowledged the futility of trying to find the needle in the haystack. But he knew he’d seen it elsewhere during his travels. Could those have been coded clues that would decode the Voynich? Anything was possible, and Steven realized he wouldn’t have thought twice about the symbol if he hadn’t seen it in quire 18.
Think, dammit. It’s an emblem — almost like a coat of arms with the circular labyrinth depicted as the central element.
It was right on the periphery of Steven’s awareness. But the harder he focused, the more fleeting it became.
This isn’t working.
Steven knew he’d need to stop trying to force it and wait until the gears meshed and the answer came to him. But knowing and doing were two distinctly different things. Increasingly frustrated, he decided to go for a short walk to clear his head. After alerting Frederick, he made his way down the long drive, taking in the vineyards and olive trees surrounding the property.